Menu

The Friday Cover is POLITICO Magazine's email of the week's best, delivered to your inbox every Friday morning.

Email

By signing up you agree to receive email newsletters or alerts from POLITICO. You can unsubscribe at any time. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

You might read any number of histories of the world’s most tenacious military commanders and never come across the name Janibeg, but for 15 years (until his death in 1357), the Tartar leader, khan of the Golden Horde, was one of the most powerful men in the world—the inheritor of the western part of an empire established by the great Mongol warrior, Genghis Khan.

Janibeg is all but forgotten now, except by historians who acknowledge him as the first military commander in history to use disease as a weapon. In 1344, Janibeg marched his army into the Crimea and laid siege to the Genoese controlled city of Caffa—modern day Feodosia. Janibeg was angry that the profit-obsessed Genoese were selling Tartars as slaves and aiding his hated enemies, the Mamlukes. And Janibeg wanted Caffa, a lucrative trade port on the Black Sea, for himself.

Advertisement

At first, Caffa looked like it might fall to Janibeg’s immensely superior forces. But in November of 1346, Janibeg’s army was devastated by a sickness known for it’s purplish apple-sized swellings, or “bubos,” that appeared on the lymph glands of its victims. This Bubonic Plague, or “Black Death” as it came to be known, was breathtakingly virulent. It took an estimated five to seven agonizing days for its victims to die—a near certain fate once the disease was contracted. In some cases, the victims spit noxious blood and died within a day. The disease ravaged the Tartar army, turning near certain triumph into near certain defeat in a matter of weeks. But the tenacious Khan was nothing if not creative. With his army sickened, Janibeg decided to lift the siege, but not before gathering the corpses of his army’s plague victims and catapulting them over Caffa’s city walls. It was the first recorded instance of biological warfare.

Janibeg exacted his revenge: After having putting up a stiff resistance to the Khan for more than two years the people of Caffa, terrified at the blighted bodies flying over their walls, fled to their galleys and set sail for Italy. In October of 1347 the plague that had devastated Janibeg’s army reached Messina in Sicily, when the dozen or so ships from Caffa docked there, with dead men at the oars, according to a narrative passed down to us by a Piacenza notary, Gabriele De’Mussi. The ships and their dwindling crews then sailed north to Genoa, where the city’s horrified leaders turned them away. But it was too late. Within weeks, the plague devastated Genoa, killing those closest to the docks first before spreading into the countryside. By the summer of 1348, the plague reached Marseilles, and moved on to Paris. In 1349, the disease appeared along the Rhine Valley, spread into what is now Germany and traveled north across the English Channel to London. One year later, the plague hit Denmark and Scandinavia (claiming 60 percent of Norway’s population), then made the grand circuit—appearing in Russia in 1351 before heading south, back to the Crimea.

The appearance of the Ebola virus on the shores of America last month, after claiming some 4900 lives in West Africa, is certainly more than a little worrisome. Just this week, a surgeon who contracted the virus in Sierra Leone died while being treated in Nebraska. But the disease is not nearly as deadly as that which, well, plagued the world in the 14th century.

***

The pandemic of the mid-1300s was actually a deadly stew of three related diseases—bubonic plague, septicaemic plague and pneumonic plague, which infected the lungs, according to historian Norman Davies. “The result,” writes Davies in Europe, A History, “was mass mortality.” At the height of the plague, 800 people died each day in Paris, 500 in Pisa and 600 in Vienna. Half of Siena died within a single year, as did 50,000 of Florence’s 100,000 citizens. Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, a classic of western literature, contains 100 stories told by 10 people sheltering from the plague. “One man shunned another,” Boccaccio explained, and father and mothers “were found to abandon their own children to their fate, untended, unvisited as if they had been strangers.”

The disease was so horrific, as historian Barbara Tuchman has chronicled, that “cases were known of persons going to bed well and dying before they woke, of doctors watching the illness at bedside and dying before the patient.” In rural areas, the plague would run its course in four to six months, but in the crowded tenements of Europe’s larger cities, the Black Death disappeared in the winter months (when flea-carrying rats sheltered from the cold), only to reappear in the spring. In Florence and London, the dead were so numerous they lay unburied. In less stricken cities, the plague’s victims were simply deposited on the doorstep for daily collection.

This wasn’t the first time the disease had ravaged the world. Historian William Rosen, author of Justinian’s Flea, documented the plague’s disastrous impact on the ancient world in one of the standard and most widely read historical studies of the period. “The last outbreak of the Justinianic Plague that started in Egypt in 540 appeared in Syria, Damascus, Sicily, Rome, and Constantinople in 744,” he explained to me, and took the lives of “perhaps 25 million, while the Black Death was maybe three times deadlier.”

Writing in 2005, historian Alistair Horne, estimated that the Black Death killed “one-third of the world’s population between Iceland in India,” in the four years following Janibeg’s corpse-tossing fiasco at Caffa. Two years later, in 2007, historian Philip Daileader updated this estimate, providing a figure that is now viewed as authoritative: “The trend of recent research is pointing to a figure more like 45-50 [percent] of the European population dying during a four year period.” Which is all to say, in the four years between Janibeg’s siege and the plague’s appearance in Russia, the Black Death killed no fewer than 75 million people and perhaps many as 100 million.

While it would be clichéd to note that this catastrophe had devastating consequences (that is what a catastrophe is), there’s no disagreement—it shattered Europe. The Black Death reinvigorated the Medieval Inquisition (heretics, it was thought, carried the disease), recast entire genealogical lines of Europe’s ruling families (King Alfonso XI of Castile expired of the pestilence), left large tracts of land untilled (ripening wheat was left untended, causing widespread malnutrition) and spurred “a dementia of despair” (in Tuchman’s phrase) that left men and women “wandering around as if mad.” Predictably, given the prevalence of this kind of stupidity in Western history, the Black Death also cost the lives of thousands of Jews, who were blamed for its spread, in a series of genocidal pogroms.

Lawlessness and debauchery followed in the plague’s wake, as did a new caste of flagellants (a religious observance foreign to Europe, until then), who wandered in groups from city to city expiating their sins. And since monasteries were especially hard hit by the disease (monks ministered to the infected, and lived in close quarters), millions of people died without the last rites—a horrifying prospect at the time. In one noted case, a Carthusian monk buried all 34 of his devout fellows, then left his monastery accompanied only by his dog. In England, the plague was so prevalent, and churchgoers so worried, that a bishop gave permission for laymen to hear confession or “if no man is present then even to a woman.” A citizen of Siena summed it up nicely: “This is the end of the world,” he wrote.

People didn’t have a clue what caused the plague at the time. Earthquakes were said to be its cause (because they released sulfurous fumes). It was thought by others to spread through the foul odors emanating from its victims. Sorcery and witchcraft were also regularly identified as the cause. In 1348, Philip VI of France (called “the Fortunate” for some reason or other) asked the medical faculty of the University of Paris to identify the plague’s origin. Their answer? A long and painful disquisition identified the triple conjunction of Saturn, Jupiter and Mars (on March 20, 1345) as the cause. At nearly the same moment, the people of Paris came up with their own explanation and killed thousands of the city’s cats. Though the feline population there seems to have recovered—as I discover during my last visit, when the creatures seemed ubiquitous, though perhaps a little skittish—that is precisely what the plagued Parisians should not have done.

No one, in any contemporary chronicle, correctly identified the chief culprit “of the most terrible of all terrors”—the flea that traveled long distances on the small black rat that thrived on ships, and then spread to brown rats and sewer rats in urban areas. The plague bacteria— Yersinia pestis—lived in the bloodstream of those rats, and in dense urban areas, fleas could easily spread the bacteria from rodents to humans. “The disease isn’t even contagious between humans,” historian Rosen told me, “but only carried by infected fleas.” No one had a clue: Flea-riddled rats roamed freely in overcrowded and filthy European ports and urban areas. And as the epidemic tore through these cities, people wore masks to keep out the “foul odors” while shrugging off a burgeoning rat population and the fleas they carried as no more than an inconvenience. Little did Janibeg know that it wasn’t the corpses, but the fleas on them that conquered Caffa.

It is now thought that the bacillus came from central Asia (and not China, as originally thought), its spread on grain ships plying the Mediterranean explained by the fact that (as historian Rosen says) “rats love grain.” Though the Black Death of the mid-1300s died out by mid-century, it recurred sporadically in Europe and in the Islamic world throughout the next 600 years. A third pandemic, which didn’t reach Europe, started in China in the 1850s, killing 10 million people in India alone. It was not until 1894 that Swiss physician Alexandre Yersin discovered the plague’s cause, while studying an outbreak of the disease in Hong Kong.

***

Surprisingly, and despite its virulence, our memory of Europe’s Black Plague disaster is spotty at best. It was long thought that the nursery rhyme “Ring Around The Rosie” provided coded references to the Black Plague. At first reading, it seems to:

Ring around the rosie,

a pocket full of posies,

ashes, ashes

we all fall down

In fact, the nursery rhyme appeared first in a compilation of children’s poems in 1881 and is now thought to reflect a religious ban on dancing among British Protestants. A more likely candidate for how the plague lives on in our memory is the German children’s story of the Pied Piper ( originally, “The Pied Piper of Hamelin”). The tale dates from the 1300s, and features a piper who was rejected by the townspeople (of Hamelin) and so lures the town’s children to their deaths—as the plague would do, metaphorically, all across Europe. But even that tale is suspect, as historians now believe the story documents the mass migration of German families from poor villages into lands further east.

Thankfully, modernity has calmed the crowds of flagellants, wacky astrologers, dancing children and German pipers. As a result of modern medicine, we now don’t react hysterically to the spread of disease, because we know it can be stopped. Or maybe not.

South Carolina Rep. Joe Wilson recently said he was worried that Hamas would purposely infect its followers with the Ebola virus before shipping them into the United States across the Mexican border. Wilson’s supposition was intended to feed our worst fears—a witch’s brew of terrorism, illegal immigration and disease. By this reading, the leaders of Hamas are latter day Janibegs, vaulting their Ebola-infected jihadists into besieged America.

“Okay, well, part of their creed would be to bring persons who have Ebola into our country,” Wilson said. “It would promote their creed. And all this could be avoided by sealing the border, thoroughly. C’mon, this is the 21st century.”

Right.

Historian Bill Rosen responded to my questions about the Black Death, in part, because he hopes to give “the current hysteria” about Ebola some historical perspective. “While medical science is a whole lot further along in 2014 than it was in either the 6th or 14th century I see little evidence that the random person is much more sophisticated in knowledge of the biology of pathogens, or the arithmetic of epidemics, than was the case 1500 years ago,” he told me. “I note that only one of the seven people who have been treated for Ebola in an American hospital has died, and both the numerator and the denominator in that particular fraction are infinitesimally small. Ebola is a terrible disease in west Africa. It isn’t anywhere else, nor is it likely to be.” Then too, despite the fear, the current contagion is on the public radar. The rate of Ebola infections has dropped sharply, the Washington Postreports, with the scale of the response now shifting from treatment to prevention.

The message is simple enough. Despite nightly news reports with footage of white clad medical workers, as well as more than 5,000 deaths from the highly infectious virus since it was first identified in 1976, Ebola (bad as it is), is not the Black Plague. So we should all just relax and go back to watching our favorite television shows—“Zombieland,” “Zombie Nation,” or “The Walking Dead.” And don’t forget to feed the cat.